Tomb Raider 2013 Review: Raising the bar

TOMB RAIDER

Square Enix’s Tomb Raider reboot is not just an excellent game: for the first time in more than a decade, Lara Croft is relevant again.

Typically, there are two ways for a game to excel. The first way is to be new and innovative, offering up something groundbreaking. The other way is by simply being so damn good that it becomes a must-play.

Tomb Raider is that second kind of game. It doesn’t do anything especially new, but it borrows just the right amounts from Uncharted, Assassin’s Creed and its own heritage while, for the most part, improving on each of those elements.

But even that excellent alchemy might not have been enough.

The cliche is that a team working on a game has a lot to prove, but the thing is, Crystal Dynamics, the developers of the new Tomb Raider actually don’t have a lot to prove. This is the team’s fifth Tomb Raider game, and they have released excellent Lara Croft adventures since taking over the franchise from Core Design in 2006.

The problem is, even though Crystal Dynamics has been making perfectly playable Tomb Raider games for more than half a decade, the franchise itself felt played out. Though the games sold well enough, they never really captured the zeitgeist the way the series did in its late-90s heyday.

It’s easy to forget now, but the first Tomb Raider film is still the highest grossing video game movie in North America.

With that kind of cultural zeitgeist, it seems strange that the series would be playing second string to Nathan Drake and the Uncharted series for character adventure games.

The whole series needed a re-think, from the ground up, and that’s just what Crystal Dynamics gave it while keeping the elements of the series people forgot they even wanted.

Central to this recasting is the rebirth of the Lara Croft character.

For all the talk of Croft as a progressive game heroine for her starring role in the series, it’s easy to forget that when the first game was released in 1996, she was mostly there — with her short-shorts and ample chest — as a cheesecake pin-up to draw the eyes of adolescent boys and to differentiate the franchise from Indiana Jones (which it was pretty obviously “inspired” by).

The new Lara Croft is basically the same as the old Lara Croft, except now she feels a lot more like a fully-formed human being as opposed to something to gawk at. It isn’t exactly that the new Lara is more realistic than the old one (she gets up to some pretty absurd stuff), but there is a core kernel of emotional believability which does wonders to support the game as a whole.

Part of this is that she now simply looks like an attractive young woman as opposed to some sort of adolescent cartoon fantasy, but the other big change is the focus of the story. Here we see Lara just as she’s starting out, and the game asks us the question “How exactly does someone become a total badass like Lara Croft?”

The tale begins with Lara on an expedition with the crew of the Endurance looking for the lost island of Yamatai. In her early twenties and just out of school, this will be her first major archaeological expedition. Against the wishes of the self-aggrandizing “TV” lead archaeologist James Whitman, Lara argues to steer the ship into “the dragon’s triangle” a dangerous stretch of sea where ships are often lost. The captain, a father-like mentor for Lara, follows her advice, against the protestations of Whitman and other members of the crew. Lara was right however, they find Yamatai, but not before smashing the ship in two and barely surviving.

The island isn’t empty however. It’s filled with a strange, cult like group of men, survivors from hundreds of other shipwrecks over the years.

Now Lara — who has spent her youth rock climbing and shooting bows, but has never really been in a life or death situation — must see if she has it in her to confront the amoral leader of the island men, and figure out why exactly the man is so obsessed with Himiko, the ancient Japanese queen who was said to rule over Yamatai thousands of years ago.

In Tomb Raider Legend, Crystal Dynamics’ first Tomb Raider game from 2006, Lara begins by doing an inhuman rock climb, crawling up a mountain stream, shooting some bad guy in the head and then making a dry joke about it. In Tomb Raider 2013, you get up to things that are far more badass than that (though Lara never laughs about it), but the fact that Lara starts off as someone lost in the woods almost freezing makes those badass moments later on work much, much better.

Once you actually start exploring the island, the gameplay is split into a few different styles. Firstly, Lara can explore her environments, hunting for food with her bow and looking for hidden tombs and items. Next, Lara can stealthily avoid or attack human foes, taking them out silently. Third Lara engages in open combat, which is a mixture of cover-based gunplay like Uncharted, and a more rough-and-tumble sort of action akin to older Tomb Raider games.

All of these pieces work on their own, and even more impressive is that they work well together. A level can shift on a dime between exploration and stealth when unexpected enemies show up, and the game seamlessly becomes about stealth. And if Lara is noticed after getting a few satisfying stealth kills, the game breaks into open combat without feeling punitive.

Speaking of open combat, Tomb Raider works wonderfully. The game is well balanced between its four core weapons, each featuring a different key use in combat situations. Like in Uncharted, enemies can take heaps of damage before falling down (they are often wearing body armour). However, unlike Uncharted, headshots really pack a punch: usually you can take most enemies down with just one. This really rewards precision in combat and increases the pace of the game pleasantly.

Tomb Raider is also one of the first, cover-based shooters where the cover system seems to just happen naturally. You don’t need to press a button to get into cover, you don’t need to worry about sticking to the wrong wall or magically popping your head up because you pressed the wrong thing. You’re just either behind cover or you’re running around. After a generation of games tweaking cover-systems, this one feels like the seemless example to emulate going forward.

THAT “R” WORD

One thing that isn’t in the game is the controversy about sexual violence that pervaded much of the discussion leading up to release. Which isn’t to say that the content isn’t controversial; it just isn’t there. The only time it really comes up is in the scene where Lara kills her first bad guy (the same one from all of the trailers) where it’s pretty clear the dude is getting off sexually from trying to strangle her (though it’s never mentioned specifically).

After Lara shoots him in the head, the subject never comes up again.

All of the enemies in the game are revealed to not only be the jerks and crazies of whatever ship they were originally on board, none of them have seen any women for up to 30 years. And yet, none of them make any sexualized or even gendered comments toward Lara while trying to kill her.

I’m relieved by this. An action-adventure game is probably not the best place to make a tasteful statement about sexual violence, and I can’t think of anything the developers could have done that wouldn’t have seemed exploitative. However, in a general sense I wish this was something that could more easily be confronted in a video game.

But that’s a topic for another day.

One thing Tomb Raider isn’t, however, is an open world game. It has open world elements throughout, and there are levels which are wide, vast and filled with collectables and side-objectives, but there is always the linear story path right in front of you and usually a clear path and story reason for what you should do next.

This will probably be a bit of an issue for some players as most of the exploration stuff seems to fly in the face of the fact that Lara really should be getting to the next place she needs to be, as there’s often more than just her life hanging in the balance.

Of course, players who are bothered by this can simply play the game like a purely linear adventure game and should have no trouble getting to the end on normal.

Doing all of that exploring will net you some goodies though. Lara can upgrade pretty much every item she gets with scrap found around the island and on enemies, and gains new abilities by killing bad guys and solving puzzles. The upgrades aren’t exceedingly needed (the game isn’t super hard), but they give a nice sense of progression for Lara’s abilities alongside her story progression.

Overall, you might have noticed that I’ve used the phrase “like Uncharted” or “unlike Uncharted” a lot in this review. When Unchartedcame out in 2007 it stole a lot of the thunder from the Tomb Raider series. From a gameplay perspective, Tomb Raider has taken everything that was in Uncharted, made it better, mixed it in with what made Lara Croft good in the past and then added some more good stuff in on top of it.

From a story perspective, Lara is now as interesting a character (though wholly different from) sardonic Nathan Drake. This feels like Unchartedwill have to start chasing Tomb Raider.

During the end credits, there is a note from Crystal Dynamics saying, basically, “Thank you for playing, we tried our damndest to make the best game we could possibly make.”

Mission accomplished.

This game was review on the Xbox 360. This is a review of the single-player portion of the game. There was not enough time with multiplayer to form a strong opinion on it.

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I also accept and agree to be bound by Postmedia's Terms and Conditions with respect to my use of the Site and I have read and understand Postmedia's Privacy Statement. I consent to the collection, use, maintenance, and disclosure of my information in accordance with the Postmedia's Privacy Policy.